AN-312.05 Bűn és Bűnhődés az Angol Regényben - Lányi Ildikó. Tarr Dániel
Capital Punishment[1]
“The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence,
and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings
than because of its own foulness.” [2]
“All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.” [3]
Capital Punishment has always been a hot issue in all of those societies, which developed social hierarchy and a secular system. It challenges mankind with the basic question of individual human rights; in the sense, that how free a person should be allowed in action and does society have the right to extinguish an individual’s life. Although it is a basic human demand to have one’s life not judged by external bodies - it is quite clear, that one must not ignore the possible consequences of an individuals life hurting the interests of a different individual or larger community. Therefore Capital Punishment as a legal issue is always a question of compromise between individual human rights and the interests of the community as a whole.
History
The earliest historical records contain evidence of capital punishment. It was mentioned in the Code of Hammurabi (1750 BC). The Bible prescribed death as the penalty for more than 30 different crimes, ranging from murder (see Exodus 21:12) to fornication (see Deuteronomy 22:13). The Draconian Code of ancient Greece imposed capital punishment for every offense.
In England, during the reigns of King Canute and William the Conqueror, the death penalty was not used, although the results of interrogation and torture were often fatal. By the end of the 15th century, English law recognized seven major crimes: treason (grand and petty), murder, larceny, burglary, rape, and arson. By 1800, more than 200 capital crimes were recognized, and as a result, 1000 or more persons were sentenced to death each year (although most sentences were commuted by royal pardon).
In the American colonies before the Revolution, the death penalty was commonly authorized for a wide variety of crimes. Blacks, whether slave or free, were threatened with death for many crimes that were punished less severely when committed by whites.
Efforts to abolish the death penalty did not gather momentum until the end of the 18th century; in England and America this reform was led by the Quakers (Society of Friends). In Europe, a short treatise, On Crimes and Punishments (1764), by the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria, inspired influential thinkers such as the French philosopher Voltaire to oppose torture, flogging, and the death penalty. Encouraged by the writings of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, England repealed all but a few of its capital statutes during the 19th century. In 1808, the parliament repealed an Elizabethan statute making it a capital offense to steal from the person following a campaign by London barrister Samuel Romilly, who reformed the English criminal laws and agitated against slavery. And in 1823 Britain abolished the death penalty for more than 100 crimes that have been capital offenses. The mitigation of capital punishment crowns efforts by the late Samuel Romilly.
Several states in the United States (led by Michigan in 1847) and a few countries (beginning with Venezuela in 1853 and Portugal in 1867) abolished the death penalty entirely. Where complete abolition could not be achieved, reformers concentrated on limiting the scope and mitigating the harshness of the death penalty. Pennsylvania adopted a law in 1794 to distinguish first- and second-degree murder and limited the death penalty to murders committed with premeditation or in the course of carrying out another felony (first-degree murder). In 1846, Louisiana abolished the mandatory death penalty and authorized the option of sentencing a capital offender to life imprisonment rather than to death, a reform universally adopted in the U.S. during the following century. After the 1830s, public executions ceased to be commonplace, but did not cease entirely until after 1936. In 1890 New York introduced the electric chair for capital punishment. It was considered more modern and humane than hanging. A century later, in 1960, capital punishment again becomes a topic, when a convicted kidnapper-rapist Caryl Chessman dies in the gas chamber at San Quentin on May 2, at age 38 after nine stays of execution since he was sent to Death Row July 3, 1948. In 1966, eight student nurses in a Chicago dormitory died on July 13 at the hands of Richard F. Speck, 24, who has served time in Texas for theft, forgery, and parole violations that included threatening a woman with a knife. A Peoria jury will found Speck guilty on all eight counts of murder next year and recommended execution. A psychiatrist who had examined Speck for 100 hours will tell newsmen that brain damage in conjunction with drugs and alcohol had left Speck irresponsible for his acts. The Supreme Court will overrule the death sentence in 1971, and in 1972 a judge will impose eight sentences of 50 to 150 years each. And finally, in 1976 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 7-to-2 decision handed down July 2, stating that Capital punishment does not constitute “cruel and unusual punishment”. The court held in 1972 that the death penalty was unconstitutional, Justice Thurgood Marshall citing evidence that the death penalty did not deter crime. Congress and most states have drafted new death penalty laws for murderers, and the court upholds such laws in Georgia, Florida, and Texas.
Methods of Execution
The death penalty has been inflicted in many ways now regarded as barbaric and forbidden by law almost everywhere: Crucifixion, boiling in oil, drawing and quartering, impalement, beheading, burning alive, crushing, tearing asunder, stoning, and drowning are examples.
In the U.S., the death penalty is currently authorized in one of five ways: hanging (the traditional method of execution throughout the English-speaking world), electrocution (introduced by New YorkState in 1890), the gas chamber (adopted in Nevada in 1923), firing squad (used only in Utah), or lethal injection (introduced in 1977 by Oklahoma). In most nations that still retain the death penalty for some crimes, hanging or the firing squad are the preferred methods of execution. In some countries that adhere strictly to the traditional practices of Islam, beheading or stoning are still occasionally employed as punishment.
Effectiveness of Capital Punishment
The fundamental questions raised by the death penalty are whether it is an effective deterrent to violent crime, and whether it is more effective than the alternative of long-term imprisonment.
Defenders of the death penalty insist that because taking an offender's life is a more severe punishment than any prison term, it must be the better deterrent. Public opinion, which in the U.S. currently supports the death penalty for murder by a more than two-to-one margin, rests largely on this conviction. Supporters also argue that no adequate deterrent in life imprisonment is effective for those already serving a life term who commit murder while incarcerated; those who have not yet been caught but who would be liable to a life term if arrested; and revolutionaries, terrorists, traitors, and spies.
Those who argue against the death penalty as a deterrent to crime cite the following: (1) Adjacent states, in which one has a death penalty and the other does not, show no significant long-term differences in the murder rate; (2) states that use the death penalty seem to have a higher number of homicides than states that do not use it; (3) states that abolish and then reintroduce the death penalty do not seem to show any significant change in the murder rate; (4) no change in the rate of homicides in a given city or state seems to occur following a local execution.
In the early 1970s, some published reports purported to show that each execution in the U.S. deterred eight or more homicides, but subsequent research has discredited this finding. The current prevailing view among criminologists is that no conclusive evidence exists to show that the death penalty is a more effective deterrent to violent crime than long-term imprisonment.
“Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just.” [4]
Moral Concerns
The classic moral arguments in favor of the death penalty have been biblical and retributive. “Whosoever sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed” (Genesis 9:6) has usually been interpreted as a divine warrant for putting the murderer to death. “Let the punishment fit the crime” is its secular counterpart; both maxims imply that the murderer deserves to die. Proponents of capital punishment have also claimed that society has the right to kill in defense of its members, just as the individual may kill in self-defense. The analogy to self-defense, however, is somewhat doubtful, as long as the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent to violent crimes has not been proved.
Critics of the death penalty have always pointed to the risk of executing the innocent, although definitely established cases of this sort in recent years are rare. They have also argued that one can accept a retributive theory of punishment without necessarily resorting to the death penalty; proportioning the severity of punishment to the gravity of the crime does not require the primitive rule of “a life for a life.”
In the U.S., the chief objection to capital punishment has been that it was always used unfairly, in at least three major ways. First, women are rarely sentenced to death and executed, even though 20 percent of all homicides in recent years have been committed by women. Second, a disproportionate number of nonwhites are sentenced to death and executed. Before the 1970s, when the death penalty for rape was still used in many states, no white men were executed for raping nonwhite women, whereas most black offenders found guilty of raping a white woman were executed. Third, poor and friendless defendants, those with inexperienced or court-appointed counsel, are most likely to be sentenced to death and executed. Defenders of the death penalty, however, have insisted that, because nothing inherent in the laws of capital punishment causes sexist, racist, or class bias in its use, these kinds of discrimination are not a sufficient reason for abolishing the death penalty either on grounds of fairness or on grounds that it is a “cruel and unusual punishment,” violating the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Opponents have replied that the death penalty is inherently subject to caprice and mistake in practice and that it is impossible to administer fairly.
Current Status in the U.S.
A series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s made the death penalty in the U.S. unconstitutional if it is mandatory, if it is imposed without providing courts with sufficient guidance to determine the appropriateness of the sentence, or if it is imposed for a crime that does not take or threaten life. Apart from crimes such as treason and espionage, about which the Supreme Court has rendered no decisions, the death penalty was confined to crimes of murder, including felony murder (that is, any homicide committed in the course of committing another felony, such as rape or robbery). Thirty-seven states revised and reenacted their death penalty laws after the 1972 Court ruling that all but a few capital statutes were unconstitutional. The Court upheld some revised death penalty laws in 1976; since then more than 150 executions have been carried out. Many court decisions of the 1980s and early 1990s have lowered bars to executions. In 1986 the Court ruled that opponents of executions may be barred from juries in murder cases. The following year the Court ruled that the law may be applied to accomplices in crimes that led to murder, then rejected a challenge to capital punishment based on statistics that indicated racial bias in sentencing. In separate decisions in 1989 the Court decided that the death penalty could be applied to those who were mentally retarded or who were underage (but at least 16) at the time of the murder. In the early 1990s the trend of Supreme Court rulings was to cut back on the appeals that Death Row inmates could make to the federal courts.
In other countries the death penalty is inflicted for a range of crimes against people, property, public order, and the state. Few African and no Middle Eastern (Arab) or Asian nations have abolished it. About a dozen European countries have carried out executions since the 1970s. By the late 1980s, some Western nations had no capital punishment, while others had abolished it except for military or national security offenses.
“If he who breaks the law is not punished, he who obeys it is cheated. This, and this alone, is why lawbreakers ought to be punished: to authenticate as good, and to encourage as useful,
law-abiding behavior. The aim of criminal law cannot be correction or deterrence;
it can only be the maintenance of the legal order.” [5]
References:
Hugo Adam Bedau - "Capital Punishment," in Microsoft (R) Encarta ‘95 . [Funk & Wagnall's Corporation., 1994].
The Concise Columbia Encyclopaedia . [Columbia University Press, 1991].
James Trager - The People's Chronology . [Henry Holt and Company, 1992].
1
[1]Capital Punishment, the legal infliction of the death penalty; in modern law, means corporal punishment in its most severe form. Lynching, in contrast to capital punishment, is the unauthorized, illegal use of death as a punishment. The usual alternative to the death penalty is long-term or life imprisonment.
[2]Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), in Nicomachean Ethics . Book X.-Chpt. 9.
[3]Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), /French diplomat, philosopher./ “The Count”, in Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, “First Dialogue” [1821; repr. in The Works of Joseph de Maistre, ed. Jack Lively, 1965]. from The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations [ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1993].
[4]Simone Weil (1909–43), /French philosopher, mystic/. “Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations” . (written 1943); [repr. in Selected Essays, ed. by Richard Rees, 1962].
[5]Thomas Szasz (b. 1920), /U.S. psychiatrist/. The Second Sin, “Punishment” (1973).